October:52 sales
November:60 sales
December:58 sales
January:36 sales
February:39 sales
MARCH:???
Is this some kind of help to fix the search engine???
Or is this a pure coincidence???
Sorry for bothering.
Regards.

I’m also curious to know how long it takes changes to go into affect when doing updates to item descriptions and tags.

It’s rather confusing to see the same authors coming up over and over again in searches but somehow never seeing my own items.

Should we believe that it’s possible to work an item up into the search results even if it’s not showing up in any of the 30 pages of results? I’d like to think this is not going to be a wasted effort otherwise these items become essentially worthless if they can’t be found.

I have a suggestion in where a search field is needed, the Downloads Page. I have over 107 products purchased on Envato’s marketplaces but it is hard to find a particular purchase without having to go page by page.

Hi, I just noticed some search-related behaviour that I think might be confusing for buyers:

When I search for any term, the system first shows the “Best Match” results.

When I now move from the first page of the “Best Match” results to any following page – and then sort by sales, I don’t get redirected to the FIRST page of the “Sort by Sales” results. Instead I stay on the page number that I had been on…

How does this make sense regarding usability? When I search through several pages of “Best Match” results and don’t find what I want and therefore want to resort the results for my search term, I’d want to start from page one…!

Another search anomaly?

I’ve been testing some of my items in search and found another problem. – presumably to do with the synonyms again. The reason I’m writing this, is because it’s kind of frustrating to have a retro file in the retro category, with retro in the tags and description that has 850 sales, that only lands on page 4, right next to an older, lower-selling file with no mention of “retro” at all. Is there something I’m missing?

The file in question is Delicious. It’s a retro file. It’s in the category After Effects Project Files / Video Displays / Retro. It has “retro” in its tags and it has “retro” in the description. It has 850 or so sales. It shows up halfway down page 4.

Now let’s take the file directly after it in the search results, Colorful Stripes HD. It is also in a category with Retro in the name. Motion Graphics / Transitions / Retro. But that’s where it ends. It doesn’t have “retro” in the title, the tags or the description. On top of this, it has only around 200 sales, a lower star rating than Delicious and is an older file. Why is it at the same rank? I can find no words that could be synonymous with “retro”.

One of the highest hits on page one is Kinetica – a file that is similar to Delicious in many respects. It has similar sales, similar age, it is in a category with Retro in the name and it has retro in the tags. It doesn’t however have retro in the description. Does the fact that the file was featured boost it high?

Or Christmas Landscape. Yes it is relatively new (over 3 months old as I write), but its newness seems to be boosting it far too high, because it doesn’t mention the word “retro” in the title, nor does it mention it in the tags or description. Nor does there appear to be any synonyms for “retro” anywhere. Why is it on page 2 of the search results? This isn’t even a retro file. What’s boosting it so high?

What about Indie Leak Transitions? Category is Motion Graphics / Transitions / Retro, no description at all (just an image), “retro” is however in tags, as is “vintage”. Sales 149. Uploaded about 16 months ago.

I wonder if you’re searching the category somehow as a string, so Motion Graphics / Backgrounds / Retro ranks much higher than After Effects Project Files / Video Displays / Retro and concluding that the first has a higher density of the word “retro” because the rest of the category string is shorter?

Also, is a combination of the over-favouring of the category with synonym search problems and over boosted newness, throwing new results far too high up the charts, resulting in loads of new files ranking high in the “retro” charts that have little or no mention of retro at all… neither in the tags, nor in the title, nor in the description.

Is there a kind of double counting going on? In the Indie Leak Transitions file, there’s the word “retro” and the word “vintage” amongst the tags. Here, the user has himself used a synonym in the tags. Presumably, then, that’s two “retros” out of 15 in the tags, or maybe each is being counted twice – hence the big boost. If I created a file that I definitively wanted to appear high up in the retro category, could I just get my thesaurus out and pop in a handful of “retro” synonyms?

Or is there something else going on? Are you already managing to log successful user searches from the past and search on those as well, which means some files are getting boosted for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent to the user?

By the way, is the sales boosting fixed for the other marketplaces yet, or are we still working with Themeforest figures? The “retro” search is throwing up pretty much entirely new files on page 1. I do understand the need to boost new files, and I’m cool with the idea that this will displace other files. It’s good for me too when I release a new file. However, it currently doesn’t seem right that a general Best Match should feature almost exclusively new files at the top of the charts, and thereby displace stuff that’s far more relevant in terms of tags, descriptions, sales and so on.